The people who lived in apartments right next to Peterman would tell detectives that they hadn’t heard an argument or a fight the night before.

Its unclear why, but a police officer told a local reporter from the Grand Junction Sentinel at the time that Peterman had likely committed suicide.

The evidence certainly didn’t seem to point in that direction.

But after the autopsy concluded it was a homicide caused by “blunt force trauma” to the head, the record was corrected. This could have only been a murder.

There was no sign that the killer broke into the apartment or that the killer stole something from the apartment. Peterman’s red sports car wasn’t taken.

Stogsdill declined to say what the killer had used to bludgeon Peterman with besides pointing out that it was an object that had belonged to the victim.

The killer had not brought the object with him and he apparently was let into the apartment by Peterman, likely indicating he was an acquaintance.

The struggle was very violent.

Peterman had wounds all over his body. He had defensive wounds including cuts and bruises.

One resident of the apartments, who lived on the other side of the building, recalled something suspicious.

A few days before Peterman’s body was found, the resident heard muffled sounds. It was some type of a scuffle.

The person couldn’t tell which apartment the noise was coming from. The walls of the building were so thin sound traveled from one end of the building to the other.

One of many people police interviewed at the time was Peterman’s roommate.

But the roommate claimed that he had traveled by bus to Kansas City several days before Peterman was found dead, according to news reports. Police confirmed his story.

After he was told Peterman was killed, the roommate flew back to Grand Junction two days after Peterman’s body was found to be interviewed by detectives.

Grand Junction Police Cmdr. Mike Nordine, who heads up the department’s detectives, told a reporter from The Daily Sentinel in Grand Junction last month that Peterman was openly gay.

“It was a real difficult case because of his lifestyle. There were several people we interviewed who had issues with that,” he was quoted as saying.

Investigators pursued the lead that Peterman’s death was a hate crime, Stogsdill said.

“There was no indication that they made fun of him or he was treated poorly because of who he was,” she said.

Stogsdill emphasized that the belief that Peterman was gay was shared by many people but none of them said they knew positively that he was gay.

Part of the challenge of solving the case today is that many of the witnesses who knew Peterman are now dead, including his mother and sister. Some of the evidence in the case was also thrown away over the years, Stogsdill said.

“It wasn’t determined one way or the other whether it was a hate crime,” Stogsdill said.

Stogsdill said that she has sent remaining pieces of evidence including the bloody object discovered in the kitchen that may have been used to bludgeon Peterman to CBI for DNA testing.

Her hope is that some of the blood on the suspected murder weapon belonged to the suspect and that he or she can still be arrested.

“It still is baffling how he ended up dead,” she said. “It’s not an easy one.”

Anyone with information that could help solve this case is asked to call Mesa County Crime Stoppers at 970-241-STOP.

Kirk Mitchell is a general assignment reporter at The Denver Post who focuses on criminal justice stories. He began working at the newspaper in 1998, after writing for newspapers in Mesa, Ariz., and Twin Falls, Idaho, and The Associated Press in Salt Lake City. Mitchell first started writing the Cold Case blog in Fall 2007, in part because Colorado has more than 1,400 unsolved homicides.